by Ben Marcus
A woman appears. “Can I help you?”
“My wife is not well,” I say. “She is a doctor.”
The woman sits at her computer. She takes my wife’s name. She takes her insurance card and then she takes her temperature and blood pressure. “Are you in a lot of pain?”
“Yes,” my wife says.
Within minutes a doctor is there, pressing on my wife. “It’s got to come out,” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“Appendix. Do you want some Demerol?”
She shakes her head. “I’m working tomorrow and I’m on call.”
In the cubicle next to her, someone vomits.
The nurse comes to take blood. “They called Barry Manilow—he’s a very good surgeon.” She ties off my wife’s arm. “We call him Barry Manilow because he looks like Barry Manilow.”
“I want to do right by you,” Barry Manilow says, as he’s feeling my wife’s belly. “I’m not sure it’s your appendix, not sure it’s your gall bladder either. I’m going to call the radiologist and have him scan it. How’s that sound?” She nods.
I take the surgeon aside. “Should she be staying here? Is this the place to do this?”
“It’s not a kidney transplant,” he says.
The nurse brings me a cold drink. She offers me a chair. I sit close to the gurney where my wife lies. “Do you want me to get you out of here? I could hire a car and have us driven to the city. I could have you medevaced home.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she says. She is on the wrong side of it now.
Back in the cubicle, Barry Manilow is talking to her. “It’s not your appendix. It’s your ovary. It’s a hemorrhagic cyst; you’re bleeding and your hematocrit is falling. We have to operate. I’ve called a gynecologist and the anesthesiologist—I’m just waiting for them to arrive. We’re going to take you upstairs very soon.”
“Just do it,” she says.
I stop Barry Manilow in the hall. “Can you try and save the ovary, she very much wants to have children. It’s just something she hasn’t gotten around to yet—first she had her career, then me, and now this.”
“We’ll do everything we can,” he says, disappearing through the door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”
I am the only one in the surgical waiting room, flipping through copies of Field and Stream, Highlights for Children, a pamphlet on colon cancer. Less than an hour later, Barry Manilow comes to find me. “We saved the ovary. We took out something the size of a lemon.”
“The size of a lemon?”
He makes a fist and holds it up—“A lemon,” he says. “It looked a little funny. We sent it to Pathology.” He shrugs.
A lemon, a bleeding lemon, like a blood orange, a lemon souring in her. Why is fruit used as the universal medical measurement?
“She should be upstairs in about an hour.”
When I get to her room she is asleep. A tube poking out from under the covers drains urine into a bag. She is hooked up to oxygen and an IV.
I put my hand on her forehead. Her eyes open.
“A little fresh air,” she says, pulling at the oxygen tube. “I always wondered what all this felt like.”
She has a morphine drip, the kind she can control herself. She keeps the clicker in her hand. She never pushes the button.
I feed her ice chips and climb into the bed next to her. In the middle of the night I go home. In the morning she calls, waking me up.
“Flowers have been arriving like crazy,” she says, “from the hospital, from the ER, from the clinic.”
Doctors are like firemen. When one of their own is down they go crazy.
“They took the catheter out, I’m sitting up in a chair. I already had some juice and took myself to the bathroom,” she says proudly. “They couldn’t be nicer. But, of course, I’m a very good patient.”
I interrupt her. “Do you want anything from the house?”
“Clean socks, a pair of sweatpants, my hairbrush, some toothpaste, my face soap, a radio, maybe a can of Diet Coke.”
“You’re only going to be there a couple of days.”
“You asked if I needed anything. Don’t forget to feed the dog.”
Five minutes later she calls back, crying. “I have ovarian cancer.”
I run out the door. When I get there the room is empty. I’m expecting a big romantic scene, expecting her to cling to me, to tell me how much she loves me, how she’s sorry we’ve been having such a hard time, how much she needs me, wants me, now more than ever. The bed is empty. For a moment I think she’s died, jumped out the window, escaped. Her absence is terrifying.
In the bathroom, the toilet flushes. “I want to go home,” she says, stepping out, fully dressed.
“Do you want to take the flowers?”
“They’re mine, aren’t they? Do you think all the nurses know I have cancer? I don’t want anyone to know.”
The nurse comes with a wheelchair; she takes us down to the lobby. “Good luck,” she says, loading the flowers into the car.
“She knows,” my wife says.
We are on the Long Island Expressway. I am dialing and driving. I call my wife’s doctor in New York.
“She has to see Kibbowitz immediately,” the doctor says.
“Do you think I’ll lose my ovary?”
She will lose everything—instinctively I know that.
We are home. She is on the bed with the dog on her lap. She peeks beneath the gauze; her incision is crooked, the lack of precision an incredible insult. “Do you think they can fix it?”
In the morning we go to Kibbowitz. She is again on a table, her feet in stirrups, in launch position, waiting. Before the doctor arrives she is interviewed and examined by seven medical students. I hate them. I hate them for talking to her, for touching her, for wasting her time. I hate Kibbowitz for keeping her on the table for more than an hour, waiting.
And she is angry with me for being annoyed. “They’re just doing their job.”
Kibbowitz arrives. He is enormous, like a hockey player, a brute and a bully. It is hard to understand how a man gets gynecologic oncology as his calling. I can tell immediately that she likes him. She will do anything he says.
“Scootch down a little closer to me,” he says, settling himself on a stool between her legs. She lifts her ass and slides down. He examines her. He looks under the gauze—“Crooked,” he says. “Get dressed and meet me in my office.”
“I want a number,” she says. “A survival rate.”
“I don’t deal in numbers,” he says.
“I need a number.”
He shrugs. “How’s seventy percent?”
“Seventy percent what?”
“Seventy percent live five years.”
“And then what?” I ask.
“And then some don’t,” he says.
“What has to come out?” she asks.
“What do you want to keep?”
“I wanted to have a child.”
This is a delicate negotiation; they talk parts. “I could take just the one ovary,” he says. “And then after the chemo you could try and get pregnant and then after you had a child we could go in and get the rest.”
“Can you really get pregnant after chemo?” I ask.
The doctor shrugs. “Miracles happen all the time,” he says. “The problem is you can’t raise a child if you’re dead. You don’t have to decide now, let me know in a day or two. Meanwhile I’ll book the operating room for Friday morning. Nice meeting you,” he says, shaking my hand.
“I want to have a baby,” she says.
“I want to have you,” I say.
Beyond that I say nothing. Whatever I say she will do the opposite. We are at that point—spite, blame, and fault. I don’t want to be held responsible. She opens the door of the consulting room. “Doctor,” she shouts, hurrying down the hall after him, clutching her belly, her incision, her wound. “Take it,” she screams. “Take it all the hell out.”
He is standing outside another examination room, chart in hand.
He nods. “We’ll take it through your vagina. We’ll take the ovaries, the uterus, cervix, omentum, and your appendix, if they didn’t already get it in Southampton. And then we’ll put a port in your chest and sign you up for chemotherapy—eight rounds should do it.”
She nods.
“See you Friday.”
We leave. I am holding her hand, holding her pocketbook on my shoulder, trying to be as good as anyone can be.
“Why don’t they just say ‘eviscerate’? Why don’t they just come out and say, on Friday at nine we’re going to eviscerate you—be ready.”
“Do you want a little lunch? Some soup? There’s a lovely restaurant near here.”
She looks flushed. I put my hand to her forehead. She’s burning up. “You have a fever. Did you mention that to the doctor?”
“It’s not relevant.”
Later, when we are at home, I ask, “Do you remember our third date? Do you remember asking—how would you kill yourself if you had to do it with bare hands? I said I would break my nose and shove it up into my brain, and you said you would reach up with your bare hands and rip your uterus out through your vagina and throw it across the room.”
“What’s your point?”
“No point—I just suddenly remembered it. Isn’t Kibbowitz taking your uterus out through your vagina?”
“I doubt he’s going to throw it across the room,” she says. There is a pause. “You don’t have to stay with me now that I have cancer. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anything.”
“If I left, I wouldn’t be leaving because you have cancer. But I would look like an ass, everyone would think I couldn’t take it.”
“I would make sure they knew it was me, that I was a monster, a cold steely monster, that I drove you away.”
“They wouldn’t believe you.”
She suddenly farts and runs, embarrassed, into the bathroom—as though this is the first time she’s farted in her life. “My life is ruined,” she yells, slamming the door.
“Farting is the least of it.”
When she comes out she is calmer, she crawls into bed next to me, wrung out, shivering.
I hold her. “Do you want to make love?”
“You mean one last time before I’m not a woman, before I’m a dried old husk?”
Instead of fucking we fight. It’s the same sort of thing, dramatic, draining. When we’re done, I roll over and sleep in a tight knot on my side of the bed.
“Surgical menopause,” she says. “That sounds so final.” I turn toward her. She runs her hand over her pubic hair. “Do you think they’ll shave me?”
I am not going to be able to leave the woman with cancer. I am not the kind of person who leaves the woman with cancer, but I don’t know what you do when the woman with cancer is a bitch. Do you hope that the cancer prompts the woman to reevaluate herself, to take it as an opportunity, a signal for change? As far as she’s concerned there is no such thing as the mind-body connection; there is science and there is law. There is fact and everything else is bullshit.
Friday morning, while she is in the hospital registration area waiting for her number to be called, she makes another list out loud: “My will is in the top left drawer of the dresser. If anything goes wrong, pull the plug. No heroic measures. I want to be cremated. Donate my organs. Give it away, all of it, every last drop.” She stops. “I guess no one will want me now that I’m contaminated.” She says the word “contaminated” filled with disgust, disappointment, as though she has failed, soiled herself.
It is nearly 8:00 P.M. when Kibbowitz comes out to tell me he’s done. “Everything was stuck together like macaroni and cheese. It took longer than I expected. I found some in the fallopian tube and some on the wall of her abdomen. We cleaned everything out.”
She is wheeled back to her room, sad, agitated, angry.
“Why didn’t you come and see me?” she asks accusatorily.
“I was right there the whole time, on the other side of the door, waiting for word.”
She acts as though she doesn’t believe me, as though I screwed with a secretary from the patient services office while she was on the table.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’ve taken a trip to another country and my suitcases are lost.”
She is writhing. I adjust her pillow, the position of the bed.
“What hurts?”
“What doesn’t hurt? Everything hurts. Breathing hurts.”
Because she is a doctor, because she did her residency at this hospital, they give me a small folding cot to set up in the corner of the room. Bending to unfold it, something happens in my back, a hot searing pain spreads across and down. I lower myself to the floor, grabbing the blanket as I go.
Luckily she is sleeping.
The nurse who comes to check her vital signs sees me. “Are you in trouble?”
“It’s happened before,” I say. “I’ll just lie here and see where it goes.”
She brings me a pillow and covers me with the blanket.
Eric and Enid arrive. My wife is asleep and I am still on the floor. Eric stands over me.
“We’re sorry,” Eric whispers. “We didn’t get your message until today. We were at Enid’s parents’—upstate.”
“It’s shocking, it’s sudden, it’s so out of the blue.” Enid moves to look at my wife. “She looks like she’s in a really bad mood, her brow is furrowed. Is she in pain?”
“I assume so.”
“If there’s anything we can do, let us know,” Eric says.
“Actually, could you walk the dog?” I pull the keys out of my pocket and hold them in the air. “He’s been home alone all day.”
“Walk the dog—I think we can do that,” Eric says, looking at Enid for confirmation.
“We’ll check on you in the morning,” Enid says.
“Before you go; there’s a bottle of Percocet in her purse—give me two.”
During the night she wakes up. “Where are you?” she asks.
“I’m right here.”
She is sufficiently drugged that she doesn’t ask for details. At around six she opens her eyes and sees me on the floor.
“Your back?”
“Yep.”
“Cancer beats back,” she says and falls back to sleep.
When the cleaning man comes with the damp mop, I pry myself off the floor. I’m fine as long as I’m standing.
“You’re walking like you have a rod up your ass,” my wife says.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask, trying to be solicitous.
“Can you have cancer for me?”
The pain management team arrives to check on my wife’s level of comfort.
“On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel?” the pain fellow asks.
“Five,” my wife says.
“She lies,” I say.
“Are you lying?”
“How can you tell?”
The specialist arrives. “I know you,” he says, seeing my wife in the bed. “We went to school together.”
My wife tries to smile.
“You were the smartest one in the class and now look,” he reads my wife’s chart. “Ovarian cancer and you, that’s horrible.”
My wife is sitting up high in her hospital bed, puking her guts into a metal bucket, like a poisoned pet monkey. She is throwing up bright green like an alien. Ted, her boss, stares at her, mesmerized.
The room is filled with people—people I don’t know, medical people, people she went to school with, people she did her residency with, a man whose fingers she sewed back on, relatives I’ve not met. I don’t understand why they don’t excuse themselves, why they don’t step out of the room. I don’t understand why there is no privacy. They’re all watching her like they’ve never seen anyone throw up before—riveted.
She is not sleeping. She is not eating. She is not getting up and walki
ng around. She is afraid to leave her bed, afraid to leave her bucket.
I make a sign for the door. I borrow a black Magic Marker from the charge nurse and print in large black letters, DO NOT DISTURB.
They push the door open. They come bearing gifts, flowers, food, books. “I saw the sign, I assumed it was for someone else.”
I am wiping green spittle from her lips.
“Do you want me to get rid of everyone?” I ask.
I want to get rid of everyone. The idea that these people have some claim to her, some right to entertain, distract, bother her more than I, drives me up the wall. “Should I tell them to go?”
She shakes her head. “Just the flowers, the flowers nauseate me.”
An hour later, I empty the bucket again. The room remains overcrowded. I am on my knees by the side of her hospital bed, whispering, “I’m leaving.”
“Are you coming back?” she whispers.
“No.”
She looks at me strangely. “Where are you going?”
“Away.”
“Bring me a Diet Coke.”
She has missed the point.
It is heartbreaking seeing her in a stained gown, in the middle of a bed, unable to tell everyone to go home, unable to turn it off. Her pager is clipped to her hospital gown, several times it goes off. She returns the calls. She always returns the calls. I imagine her saying, What the hell are you bothering me for—I’m busy, I’m having cancer.
Later, I am on the edge of the bed, looking at her. She is increasingly beautiful, more vulnerable, female.
“Honey?”
“What?” Her intonation is like a pissy caged bird—cawww. “What? What are you looking at? What do you want?” Cawww.
“Nothing.”
I am washing her with a cool washcloth.
“You’re tickling me,” she complains.
“Make sure you tell her you still find her attractive,” a man in the hall tells me. “Husbands of women who have mastectomies need to keep reminding their wives that they are beautiful.”
“She had a hysterectomy,” I say.
“Same thing.”
Two days later, they remove the packing. I am in the room when the resident comes with a long tweezers like tongs and pulls yards of material from her vagina, wads of cotton, and gauze, stained battlefield red. It’s like a magic trick gone awry, one of those jokes about how many people you can fit in a telephone booth, more and more keeps coming out.
